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Deaf Babies Use Their Hands To Babble, Researcher Finds

Deaf babies of deaf parents babble with their hands in the same rhythmic, repetitive fashion as hearing infants who babble with their voices, a new study has found.

The deaf babies, who presumably watch their parents use sign language at home, start their manual babbles before they are 10 months old, the same age hearing children begin stringing together sounds into wordlike units.

And just as hearing babies experiment with a few key noises like “dadadada” or “babababa,” so deaf infants use several motions over and over, including one gesture that looks like “O.K.” and another that resembles a hand symbol of the numeral 1.

The gestures of the deaf children do not have real meaning, any more than babble noises have meaning, but they are far more systematic and deliberate than are the random finger flutters and fist clenches of hearing babies. The motions seem to be the deaf babies’ fledgling attempts to master language, said Dr. Laura Ann Petitto, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal. She is the principal author of the new report, which is appearing today in the journal Science.

The new research strongly suggests that the brain has an innate capacity to learn language in a particular, stepwise fashion, by stringing together units into what eventually become meaningful words, Dr. Petitto said. The brain will progress from one stage to another regardless of whether language is conveyed through speaking, hand-signing or presumably any other method of communication, she added.

The results contradict a widespread assumption among linguists that the maturation of the vocal cords affects language development among infants.

“For centuries, people thought that speech is language and language is speech,” she said. “There’s been a whole complicated notion that the structure of the motor apparatus and the unfolding of the mouth muscles actually influenced the structure and development of language.”

But in showing that deaf babies babble with their hands in a manner that has all the basic elements of vocal babbling, she said: “We’ve decoupled language from speech. We’ve torn them apart.” Praise for Study.

Other researchers in the field of early language development praised the new study as significant and extremely well designed.

“I think this is important work,” said Dr. Richard P. Meier, an assistant professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Texas. “It’s been suggested that all children pass through a regular sequence of milestones in speech acquisition, from simple cooing early on, to structured babbling at eight months, to the first word at about 12 months. This work gives us a new dimension of how language matures.”

Dr. Marilyn M. Vihman, who is doing research on language acquisition at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., said the latest results offered further proof that babbling is a crucial step in language deveopment. “You’ll see the emergence of babbling at the same age in any infant who has been exposed to language regardless of other things, including intelligence,” she said. “Babies babble regardless of whether the language spoken at home is English, Japanese, French or, it seems, sign language.” Videotaping Infants

Dr. Petitto and her graduate student, Paula F. Marentette, videotaped five infants at ages 10, 12 and 14 months. Two of the infants were deaf children of deaf parents who use American Sign Language to communicate, while the other three were hearing offspring of hearing adults. The researchers analyzed every hand gesture of the infants and compared the two groups.

They found that the hearing children made many hand gestures, but that the gestures never became organized or repetitive. By comparison, the deaf babies soon began showing evidence of using about 13 different hand motions over and over again. Nearly all of them were actual elements of American Sign Language: gestures that do not in themselves mean anything, but have the potential to indicate something when pieced together with other gestures.

Sign languages are structured much like any spoken language, Dr. Petitto said. Distinct gestures and hand shapes are the equivalent of syllables, and thus must be presented in a series to assume any sense. Reinforcement From Parents

She believes that the deaf parents noticed the nascent efforts of their children to communicate through signs and began reinforcing the gestures, just as normal parents talk back to and reinforce their babbling infants by turning the babble into words, for example, by saying “dadadada . . . Daddy.”

But there was idiosyncratic taste at work as well. Just as one hearing baby may prefer to say “babababa” while another fastens upon “gagaga,” so one of the deaf infants tended to make her gestures in front of her torso, while the other deaf baby performed his hand signs around his head and face.

The deaf babies could make noise, but they did not babble vocally like the hearing children.

Dr. Petitto said that the new work also supported the theory that the basic rhthym of all languages was the same, building upon a pattern that alternates consonants and vowels. Although the analogy is only approximate in sign language, the deaf babies did alternate between mobile gestures, which are thought to be somewhat vowel-like in their rhythms, and static hand shapes, the rough equivalent of the consonant.

I’m concerned how article says deaf babies of deaf parents. It should be def babies of parents who knows sign language. I have hearing parents who knew sign language since I was a baby. I knew of other two deaf babies like me all were adopted by hearing parents and all of our parents went to Gallaudet ad attended sign language classes learning to communicate with us all our lives.

Good point. Probably ‘deaf babies of parents who speak sign language frequently during development’ would be the most accurate description, though while more accurate, it’s much longer than ‘deaf parents’.

ASL will never truly be a hearing person’s natural language and hearing won’t ever sign the same or have the same flow as a deaf person has when signing. So I agree with the article stated as deaf parents meaning that their natural language and it the natural way to communicate to deaf babies and even hearing children who have deaf parents and ASL was their first language b4 they spoke. I know this coming from a deaf family and im deaf!